Video: At Manhattan Gallery, You Art What You Eat

A recent dinner party at Hotel Particulier, an art gallery in Lower Manhattan, began with chefs squirting sauce into diners’ palms and rolling arancini, warm rice balls, across the table for them to catch.

There were no plates or utensils, and the chefs, Jose Ramirez-Ruiz and Pamela Yung of the Brooklyn pop-up restaurant Chez Jose, walked on the table to deliver portions of the mostly vegetarian meal to guests.

By the end of the night, two guests had pulled on clean socks and danced across the table to join in the night’s unusual meld of food and art, and the table itself looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, smeared, drizzled and splattered with foods of different textures and colors.

Emilie Baltz, a food designer and artist who “curated” the meal, which was called “Traces” and cost $350 per person, said she wanted guests to experience the simple pleasures of eating with their hands, playing with their food, and losing inhibitions as they tried something different and new.

At ‘Traces,’ a dinner at Hotel Paticulier in New York doubled as performance art. Pictured, a guest spontaneously dances across the table.

Jennifer Weiss for The Wall Street Journal

“I think food is an incredible element to connect and experience each other in different ways,” said Ms. Baltz, whose past work has explored intersections between food and art. “It’s an extraordinary medium.”

Courtney Smith, a Brooklyn-based artist, created the wooden table turned canvas and stage, designing built-in stalls for seating and ornamental posts some guests decorated with food and used for stretching their arms. Ivan Navarro, also of Brooklyn, served as the night’s DJ.

“Although we tend to sit around a table in a geometric fashion, this makes it so pronounced and explicit and also inflexible to some degree,” Ms. Smith said.

The dining experience included another level of person-to-person interaction: volunteers designated as “human backrests” sat against the backs of some guests.

Food is scattered on the table at the end of the meal.

Jennifer Weiss for The Wall Street Journal

Beets that had been sliced into ribbons were unspooled and placed in front of diners as part of a deconstructed salad that also included scattered leaves of radiccio and slices of orange. Guests played with the beet ribbons as they ate, used hunks of bread baked with black garlic to soak up sauces, and “painted” with florettes of brown-buttered cauliflower.

“I want diners to take away from tonight no stains on their clothes,” Ms. Baltz joked before the dinner. (Guests wore aprons, which Ms. Baltz, Mr. Ramirez-Ruiz and Ms. Yung signed at the end of the meal.)

“The most important thing for anyone to come away from this evening with is a sense of renewed wonder,” she added. “A sense of play, delight.”